The Secret to Engaging Your Audience Respectfully

Here's the funny thing. Everyone's worried about coming across as condescending when they speak to an audience. I've worked with thousands of executives all over the globe, and so many people just like you are worried about perception that they're looking down on their audience. The real problem is not being condescending. The real problem, from my perspective, is too many executives, too many presenters assume their audience is 10 times smarter than they are. Now, what do I mean by that? It's that speakers give way too many data points, way too much complexity in their presentation. First question I ask anyone I work with anywhere in the globe, think of the best speaker you've seen in the last five years, 10 years in your industry. Now, how many message points do you really remember? And typically it's 0 or 1 or 2, maybe 3. All the years I've asked that question, no one's remembered more than five. Literally a handful of ideas from the best speaker they've ever seen in their industry, and yet they stand up and give presentations with 5, 10, 15, 20 points per slide. 20 slides. I always say the same question. Why do you assume they can remember all that stuff and you can only remember a handful of ideas they don't know? It's something we just do out of insecurity. We want to give people so much information. You don't really think everyone in your audience has such a better memory than you do? No, of course not. So what that really means is you shouldn't try to overwhelm your audience with too many facts, numbers, concepts, points. Focus on a handful of points. Same thing with slides. If it's taking you an hour to build a slide and add all the data and rearrange things, and yet you're going to have that slide up for 20 seconds before you go to the next slide in front of your audience. What you're really saying is you think your audience is a thousand times smarter than you are. They can grasp something. 20 seconds that took you an hour to kind of figure it out. So, no, I don't say dumb it down for your audience. What I'm saying is, respect your audience by respecting yourself. If you can only grasp a handful of key concepts from a great speaker, then ask your audience to do the same thing from you. You've got to simplify your messages. Next, narrow them down, be a better editor, and use simple graphics and images. When you're using PowerPoint, that will make you a much better speaker.